Beyond Gigabit Ethernet
At the physical layer, very high-performance low-cost fiber-optic physical layers being developed for use in small multimedia workgroup applications.
SCI (IEEE-1596 1992) and HIPPI-6400 (ANSI X3T11 1997) are possible early implementations with multiple Gb/s sustained throughput to a given node.
Highest performance interconnect based on parallel fiber optics. An example of is the HP/USC-POLO effort.
The network data rate and the cost of the network is no longer the bottleneck.